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Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes edited two collections of short stories - African Short Stories (AWS, 1985; 159) and Contemporary African Short Stories . What makes these collections unique and much different from other anthologies - limiting it to those I have read - is the extent of its coverage. These anthologies cover Africa geographically and politically. Most often, writers from North African countries are hardly included in such anthologies and so too are Francophone or Lusophone Africa. Translations are hardly considered. Even in this collection, whereas West Africa has five entries; East Africa, five; and Southern Africa, seven; Northern Africa has only three entries. Regardless, this is an attempt at covering every part of the continent.  This review will be in four parts; each part dedicated to one region. The collection addresses several subjects: from politics to religion; poverty to civil war; WEST AFRICA The False Prophet by Sembene Ousmane: This story w...

Permit for Survival (Educational Press and Manufacturers Ltd, 1981; 120) by Bill Marshall is a humorous book that captures the socioeconomic life of Ghanaians in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It acts as an aperture through which the reader could observe the sights and sounds of a city bourgeoning with hope, opportunities, aspirations, struggles, squashed dreams, and unsurmountable challenges. The book has recently been released under the title Brother Man. The story opens with twenty-six year old clerk Joseph Jonathan Kofi Kuma, or Jojo as he was affectionately called, faced with the arduous task of preventing his own burial at Anoati, his hometown, after he saw his obituary and funeral announcement in the newspaper. The story tells of the misfortunes that befell him on his journey and after. After the success of this unimaginable quest - similar to some of those embarked upon by Tutuola's Palm Wine Tapster, though not in its mysteriousness - Jojo had to prove to his bureauc...

Tales of Tenderness and Power  (144) is a collection of twenty-one short stories by the South African-born Botswana writer Bessie Head published posthumously by Heinemann African Writers Series (1989). All the stories, with the exception of three were published in various magazines prior to her demise. In this collection, the beauty and tenderness of Bessie's writings, her keen observation, and her ability to relate her environment to occurrences in lives of the people come to the fore. She does not set out to tell a totally fictitious tale as fiction is sometimes interpreted to be; she writes about the lives of real people who lived those lives - their hardships, their aspirations, their fears, their hopes - in as direct a manner as possible. In addition, some of the stories are are not stories at all but historical, but not necessarily ancient, narratives. The story has been arranged to begin with why and how she wants to tell her stories. It then moves on gradually to...

Search Sweet Country (Heinemann, 1986; 352) is the first novel by the Ghanaian poet, Kojo Laing. It expanded what the author had already started started with his poetry, his unique use of words, his ability to make words turn, somersault, split and do some weird, but adorable, gymnastics. As is the foibles of poets, Laing's poetry seeped unrelentingly into his prose in a lovely kind of way. This is a book that does away with the straitjacket novelistic requirements, those narrow rules requiring a plot, an arch, and such and such. Laing is the persona in that famous Frost's poem, for he takes the road less travelled, weaving his words in unique patterns to tell our story and it is this boldness to chart his own course that sets him apart from many other African writers and which has seen a renewed interest in his works leading to the re-release of his books. Some readers - including me when I first encountered his writing in Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters  - find...

It is apartheid South Africa. This time Blacks are up in arms, heavy arms, fighting the Whites. And the Russians and Cubans are here to help them. White South Africans are running for their dear lives. With nowhere to go, the Smales' family took the advice of their houseboy, a man they named July, following him to his family. July's People  (Penguin, 1981; 160) is about the changes in the roles and the dynamics of Black-White relationships. The Smales' are liberals whose relationship with South Africa Blacks in general and with their houseboy in particular is cordial and non-discriminatory. However, they were forced to analyse this view when it dawns on them that, though liberals as they are they could not speak any of the native's language whereas the apartheidists or their followers could and therefore found it difficult communicating with July's people. They never also did actually ask July of his real name. They just named him as such. How liberal is one ...

Title: Harvest of Thorns Author: Shimmer Chinodya Genre: Fiction/Colonialist/Race Publishers: AWS Classics Pages: 248 Year: 1989 Country: Zimbabwe Shimmer Chinodya is one of the few Zimbabwean authors I have read whose works explore the struggle for independence from the stand point of the fighters and the general pulse of the nation at the time and is able to provide cogent argument for it without questioning, unnecessarily, the human cost. Not that he assumes that all the black Zimbabweans at the time were in support of the war; he accepts the human loss but Chinodya presents his work in such a way that make the struggle more significant, for the coloniser will not grant freedom to the colonised without a struggle and there is no struggle without its human loss and if you expect otherwise then you really don't know what you want. Most Zimbabwean literature, especially those published a decade or two after the war, makes it look as if the war was irrelevant and...

Title: The Trouble with Nigeria Author: Chinua Achebe Genre: Non-Fiction/Socio-Political Articles Publishers: Heinemann Pages: 68 Year of First Publication: 1983 Country: Nigeria Read for Amy's BAND The Trouble with Nigeria is a book of frustration of what could be termed as the Nigerian (African) Condition. In this book, Chinua Achebe spelt out, without playing around with proverbs, aphorisms, and such  curlicued manner of speech, the reasons why Nigeria, and perhaps most African countries, are facing such ginormous and seemingly unsurmountable developmental challenges. In 'Where the Problem Lies', the author specifically identified and attributed the problem. He writes  the problem with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. the Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the c...